Verse Novel
1. Bibliography
Sones, Sonya. STOP PRETENDING: WHAT HAPPENED WHEN MY BIG SISTER WENT CRAZY. New York: HarperTempest, 1999. ISBN 0064462188.
2. Plot Summary
When the author was twelve years old, her older sister had a nervous breakdown on Christmas Eve, requiring months of hospitalization in a psychiatric ward. This book was drawn from that time in Sones’s life. The book provides a free verse poetic memoir of what that time was like for the author and her family, and their collective journey as a family toward recovery.
3. Critical Analysis
The strength of this verse novel is its straight-forward style. The narrator, affectionately called “Cookie” by her family, tells about dealing with her sister’s mental illness as if she were writing in her journal; it is offered with candor. We are allowed into her world and into her mind, where as a young adult she must cope with a sudden, tragic, and extreme change in her family status quo – her sister is suffering from a mental breakdown, and her entire family feels powerless to help her. The narrator desperately wants her sister back, as she was before, and wants her family to return to the happiness they knew before the breakdown happened. This verse novel is a journey toward hope.
4. Awards and Review Excerpts
Christopher Award
Claudia Lewis Award for Poetry
Myra Cohn Livingston Poetry Award
Gradiva Award for Pest Poetry Book
ALA Best Book for Young Adults
IRA/CBC Young Adults Choice
(And the list goes on…)
Review Excerpts:
School Library Journal review:
“An unpretentious, accessible book that could provide entry points for a discussion about mental illness-its stigma, its realities, and its affect on family members. Based on the journals Sones wrote at the age of 13 when her 19-year-old sister was hospitalized due to manic depression, the simply crafted but deeply felt poems reflect her thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreams during that troubling time…”
Kirkus review:
“In a story based on real events, and told in poems, Sones explores what happened and how she reacted when her adored older sister suddenly began screaming and hearing voices in her head, and was ultimately hospitalized. Individually, the poems appear simple and unremarkable, snapshot portraits of two sisters, a family, unfaithful friends, and a sweet first love. Collected, they take on life and movement, the individual frames of a movie that in the unspooling become animated, telling a compelling tale and presenting a painful passage through young adolescence…”
5. Connections
This verse novel could be used to discuss mental illness and its effect on the sufferer and their family and friends.
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